Field
The present disclosure relates to network management. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for automatic reliable layer-2 communication.
Related Art
The exponential growth of the Internet has made it a popular delivery medium for multimedia applications, such as video on demand and television. Such applications have brought with them an increasing demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger and faster switches with versatile capabilities, such as high-speed layer-2 communication, to move more traffic efficiently. However, the size of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. Furthermore, switches with higher capability are usually more complex and expensive. More importantly, because an overly large and complex system often does not provide economy of scale, simply increasing the size and capability of a switch may prove economically unviable due to the increased per-port cost.
A flexible way to improve the scalability of a switch system is to build a fabric switch. A fabric switch is a collection of individual member switches. These member switch form a single, logical switch that can have an arbitrary number of ports and an arbitrary topology. As demands grow, customers can adopt a “pay as you grow” approach to scale up the capacity of the fabric switch.
As more data-intensive applications are deployed, layer-2 communication is becoming progressively more important as a value proposition for network architects. It is desirable to provide lossless data flows on layer-2 links to facilitate reliable communication among switches while providing the flexibility and ease of deployment of the layer-2 communication.
While Ethernet fabric switches bring many desirable features to networks, some issues remain unsolved in reliable layer-2 communication.